Ant Colony Optimized Routing for Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANET)

Executive Summary

A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using centralized access points, infrastructure, or centralized administration. Routing means the act of moving information across an internet work from a source to a destination. The biggest challenge in this kind of networks is to find a path between the communication end points, what is aggravated through the node mobility. In this paper, the authors present a new routing algorithm for mobile, multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The protocol is based on swarm intelligence. Ant colony algorithms are a subset of swarm intelligence and consider the ability of simple ants to solve complex problems by cooperation.